Mechs & Mercs: Black Talons, A Real Time Strategy Game, We Take A Gander

Mechs & Mercs: Black Talons is admittedly a game that has been on the back burner with the wave of news recently, so I decided to sit down and take a proper look at this promising looking strategy game.

I don’t know how other people feel when they are sent a key from a developer, but I always aim to give an honest opinion on what I see, and honest I shall be.

About the game (From Steam)
A devastating war has torn the galaxy apart. Dozens of planets and star systems have declared independence or forged new alliances, while governments fall and warlords rise to power. Chaos and corruption are everywhere and so to maintain order and negotiate peace between the ruling factions, private mercenary armies are called to action.

You are commander of the Black Talons company, currently stationed in the Oberon system. After an eventful campaign, the military Tzanar Union has overrun the planet of Genai and blocked all departure from the system: leaving you and the Black Talons stranded. The only means of escape is to help the Genai forces repel the invading army and recapture the planet.

My thoughts
This is the first game from Camel 101, and it impressed me instantly with the interesting cutscenes and voice over that reminded me of some older strategy games I loved as a younger gamer, so as far as introductions go it’s fantastic.

The visuals on the first level are quite impressive for a lesser known title, and seem to follow on the good looks of the introduction cut-scenes, so it’s doing a good job of keeping me impressed as I get into the game.

The performance seemed great, and I managed to get a consistently high framerate. It felt really smooth, so I was really happy with how it ran for me. I was hitting above 70FPS most of the time, so that's something.

For anyone who is into RTS games like me, the user interface will seem familiar and clean. It’s probably the only high point of Mechs & Mercs that it actually does have a decent interface. Sadly, it’s only decent in the looks department.

The game-play however, was very, very slow and unsatisfying. From the style of the game I was seriously expecting action like the older Commander & Conquer titles, and while still trying to be objective about it without wishing it was C&C, the game was just clunky, for lack of a better word.

Positioning units can get really annoying, as they seriously love their spacing and going against your orders. You could send a move order to a squad, and half of them might space out really far away from your chosen location, so the pathfinding is truly annoying.
They never actually position exactly where you click either, in fact it’s always some distance away from where you click. In a strategy game you really do want your movement clicks to be as specific as possible. If I tell a squad to attack a specific turret, I expect them to do it, instantly, and not carry on shooting the weak enemy troops I don’t care about. So, the pathfinding is annoying, and the AI for my own troops is annoying, this is not going well.

The way this game plays out is pretty much this: Send units to position A, they will stop and fire at anything as soon as it’s in their line of sight, and probably die for not following your orders.

Going back to my thoughts on the interface, the way it handles dropships to bring in reinforcements is also annoying. In a traditional RTS game you would click a unit from your build order, and have it work away, but this is not what happened.
I’m not even sure how I got it to work, but eventually after some random clicking on different unit types and seeing nothing happen, a dropship did suddenly appear and deliver me some new engineers. I’m still not sure how I did it exactly, as there was no notification that they were on their way to me.

For a game that seemed so promising, I was left severely underwhelmed by the experience.

Final Verdict: Avoid it, it’s just not a polished experience. It’s a real shame, as a few more months of spit and polish could have easily turned this around, as it has the basics all in place. It just feels much more like an early access game to me.

Check out Mechs & Mercs: Black Talons on Steam, you know, only if you want, I'm certainly not telling you to. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.